Abstract

This study aims to develop a measureable tool to identify the feature of Taiwan cultural landscape. In-depth interviews from ten scholars were first conducted to design a questionnaire which contained a seven-dimension measurement model of identifying cultural landscape, and then 808 local participants were asked to response this questionnaire for gathering the quantitative data in four cultural significant sites. Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were applied to confirm the structure of the supposed measurement model from the questionnaire data. The result of factor analysis showed that the confirmed measurement model was less complicated than the supposed measurement model. The cultural feature dimension of cultural landscape was composed of three factors which are environment element, human evidence and traditional custom. And the place meaning dimension of cultural landscape contained cultural atmosphere, life dependence and affective identity. This finding revealed the evidence that local participants’ perception to the feature of cultural landscape was very different from experts’ understanding of the composition of cultural landscape in Taiwan. It also hints the difficulty of conservation for cultural landscape was local people’s disregards to their cultural landscape since these features didn’t have any physical connection with local people’s daily life. This study build a 16-item scale measuring cultural landscape from the perspective of local people in Taiwan, which provide practitioners a reliable and valid analytical tool to assess cultural landscape. And it also offered government agencies a useful foundation to make conservation strategies with local people for cultural landscape.